Running with the Pack

 Every few years I experience a great wave of conformism. "What if it is not, after all, too late for me," I ask, "to be like everyone else?" Why, after all, should I have created all these rules and prohibitions for myself—no this, no that? Why must I devote my life to chimeras and dreams that can never love me back—justice, virtue, and other abstractions? Why can't I just get a job like other people have, make an ordinary sort of living, and find meaning in the usual places—family and so forth. As I once wrote in a poem on this blog: 

One wonders if it is not
After all so easy
To tuck in the shirt and find the mate
And birth the baby and bring up the child
And have the large family and build the large house
And make the large money and lay off the coffee

And quiet the large doubts and leave the large terrors

What it really amounts to is seeking for the path of least resistance. Oh, I think, won't the world just tell me what to do at last? It's not like I have ever been afraid of hard work. So won't the world just show me what hoops to jump through, and I'll gladly do so? 

Then, what invariably happens is that the world does in fact tell me what to do, and I leap shrieking in the other direction, as far outside any hoop I can discern as possible. 

In law school, this oft-repeated pattern typically takes the form of brief periods of contemplating a generic law firm or corporate law career. What's so wrong, I ask myself, with being just an ordinary sort of lawyer? Why can't I just go where the jobs are? After all: if it's hoops you want, they have plenty: first, get a high GPA, then, write for a law journal, apply for on-campus interviewing, do moot court, get a summer associate position, devote your breath and soul to the job pulling ninety-hour weeks until you make partner. The path, whatever else it may be, is clearly marked. 

If I really wanted the world to tell me what to do, then, the world has here responded: okay, here you go: do this; these are the steps; this is the path. Follow it if you want to. You just have to submit to interviews where you will be subjected to minor humiliations like filling out online cognitive tests or proving on the spot that you can do a perfect blue book citation. You have to agree to have absolutely nothing else in your life for the next several years, and to devote yourself utterly to the firm. 

This is the true problem with conformism. The world will take you, should you apply for membership in the generic human race. There are always openings someplace. But, by definition, you have to cede your individuality. People will say this openly. If you take the big firm path, you simply become your job and nothing else. "But I don't want to devote my life utterly to some law firm!" I cry out in response. "I want to read, and to write, and to blog, and to think about things! I need some free time to do all of that!" 

And usually at that point I awake sweating from the fleeting dream of conformity and feel a surge of relief that it is not in fact too late. I've haven't yet mortgaged my soul; I haven't signed on the line with the flaming pen; there's still time to escape from the firm. And then I am reminded all over again of how thin the rewards of conformism are, how essential to me my individuality is, and that there is almost anything I would rather do than live the kind of life that corporate lawyers do. 

I was reading John Dos Passos's 1921 novel Three Soldiers last week and found it peculiarly on-point to my plight in this regard. And this was true not only because the novel is about someone who joins the military and regrets it (readers of the blog will recall that one of the specific forms that my periodic temptation toward conformism and the path of least resistance recently took was a strange and short-lived urge to sign up for the U.S. Navy) but more generally because it is about someone who at first tries to lose their individuality, only to discover there is nothing more precious in the universe. 

Dos Passos's somewhat autobiographical protagonist, a Harvard-educated composer named John Andrews, originally joins the military and ships off for France during World War I for the same reasons that I feel a periodic urge toward conformism. He wants the world to tell him what to do. He is tired of thought, he tells us, sick of doubt, of intellectual rebellion. He has exhausted all of that and reached an outer limit. What he wants now is to forget his individuality; to become one of the herd; to quiet the existential question of what to do next by having an official bark orders in his ear—in brief, as he puts it, "to humble himself into the mud of common slavery."

This, curiously, was exactly what I was identifying as the root temptation of military recruitment in my most previous blog—all before I read Dos Passos's novel. "The military, whatever else it does, at least tells you what to do," I wrote. And later, on the same point: "the military beckoned because it solves the existential terror of freedom[.]" John Andrews's experience in the novel is therefore an extremely timely warning to me: he goes into the infantry hoping for exactly what I was describing—relief from the demands of the self, an answer to the existential uncertainty; and he finds it; and then he instantly grieves the decision. 

Eventually, Andrews wakes up in a hospital after battle and, as he gradually perceives the extent of his injuries, it occurs to him that he will probably be discharged from the army as a result. He exults. His individuality is about to be restored! The very thing—his existential capacity for choice—that he tried to rid himself of may now be returned to him, and he could not be more pleased. He swears to himself to never again trade in his freedom so cheaply. From now on, he reflects, "[h]e was ready to endure anything, to face any sort of death, for the sake of a few months of liberty [....] This was his last run with the pack."

In this most unusual of war novels—the conflict ends in an Armistice about halfway through the novel, and there is very little actual fighting depicted—Dos Passos is really exploring the same theme at the center of his later novel Manhattan Transfer—the theme of rebellion; and more specifically, the distinct rebellion of the relatively privileged youth (such as Dos Passos himself was). And it is in Andrews's acknowledgement of his own privileged position that the author makes his most powerful point—in which his protagonist has his most profound realization. 

As he is sitting in his hospital bed, discovering how much he craves the very freedom and selfhood that he so idly mortgaged just a few short months before, Andrews ponders on the reasons why people so often volunteer for the sort of tyranny he just escaped. He speaks to the man next to him, a fellow recruit who has since been injured. The man explains that he was prompted to enlist for two reasons: first, his family business would lose customers if it got out that he had declined to be a soldier; second, the rhetoric of politicians had convinced him that the conflict would be a glorious struggle to make the world safe for democracy. 

Andrews listens to his reasons, and thinks that they are perfectly fine and reasonable ones. To join the military and mortgage one's freedom and individuality out of financial necessity and because one believed the cause was just—those are motives anyone can respect. But, he then thinks, what excuse did he have, who had neither of those motives? Unlike the man next to him, Andrews thinks, he was never persuaded by the soaring phrases of "bought propagandists." He knew the war would be futile, and he never believed in its mission. Nor did he need the war or the respect that came from being a soldier in order to earn his living. He had joined up, by contrast, only for the most craven reasons: he had lacked the courage to be an individual. 

Something about my own spring-like recoil this summer from the corporate law path stems from the same realization: even if there are valid motives for others to pursue that career, there would be no excuse for me specifically to give in to this particular siren song. After all, looking at the interview process and staring down the long miserable corridor of the years-worth of ninety-hour weeks that those firm jobs demand, one realizes that most human beings don't want to live that way. They go through it—those who do—because have to: they have student debts to pay off. Financial necessity. Or else, they think those jobs would be interesting and worthwhile: they want to be litigators; they want to fight for their clients and win. 

All motives one can respect. But by what right would I, who have neither of these motives, mortgage myself to the same endeavor? I don't need those jobs for the money; and I would loath the work and the time it demanded on every level. The only reason for me to do it therefore would be because the path is clear-cut; there are defined hoops to clear, and I would be spared the angst of having to make choices and think for myself. And that is really, as Dos Passos's protagonist realizes, simply a counsel of cowardice. 

And so I awake at the end of this summer feeling much like Andrews in his hospital bed. It's not too late! I was wrong to think of sacrificing my individuality so quickly, but I can still salvage it—it's not lost to me forever. I resolve, with Andrews, never again to sell myself so cheaply. This brief period was my "last run with the pack." 

And so the temptation to conformism dies all over again because I realize I am not declining to take that path because it is actually barred to me, or because the world does not offer arbitrary hoops to jump through. It offers those aplenty, if that is truly what one desires. Rather, I am not taking that path because I don't want to. I couldn't bear it; and I actually treasure my selfhood and individuality, for all the pain they cause me. This is much the same conclusion that Andrews reaches, by the midpoint of Three Soldiers, and it is also the lesson I reached at the end of my poem, which I quoted at the outset of this blog. I wrote:

And maybe it is [possible, that is, to take the conformist path and submerge one's individuality], but one knows the while
One would not do it if one could (and
Can); one recalls
A legend among some
Apologists (and anthropologists)
That the damned in fact desire
Their fate
Indeed they practically

Pray for it

And though one does not believe it, it seems
In one’s own case quite convincing.